It wasn't a church service, but the singing, hand-clapping and cheers during a rededication program of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School for Science and Technology on Sunday certainly made people feel as though they were in an environment of love and partnership.

Joseph Recasner, dean of students, urged the crowd to "let the world know that New Orleans is coming back and the Lower 9th Ward is already back," as the Original Pin-Stripe Brass Band and the Zulu Walking Warriors opened the ceremony with a second line.
King school is the first in the Lower 9th Ward to reopen since Hurricane Katrina.
King's teachers, staff and honor and graduating students got their chance to walk down the red carpet to the cheers of parents and friends.
"We are glad to be home," Principal Doris Hicks said. But the homecoming is bittersweet, she said, because at least 30 students and family members died during the storm.
Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis urged everyone to remember and honor those students who lost their lives during Katrina. "They are no longer with us," she said. "Those young children can't walk down the aisle."
Willard-Lewis said students at King school are deeply saturated in the late civil rights leader's philosophy and his struggle for moral justice. She said the waters of Katrina created a new reality in which the students, following King's model, gained the courage and the focus to survive and to move past losses into victory.
Hicks said the school has always been a beacon in the community.
"We've always been an effective school" she said. "We know where we are going, and we know how to get there."
Speaker after speaker praised Hicks and others, including Hilda Young, president of the board of the Friends of King Charter School, for proving the naysayers wrong and reopening a school in the Lower 9th Ward.
"It has been a Herculean effort to get this school open," said BESE board member Louella Givens. "Doris Hicks should go down in history as a woman of vision and a woman of courage. Doris Hicks said, 'I'm opening my school whether you want me to or not.' "
Keynote speaker Charles Steele Jr., president and CEO of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta, talked about how the SCLC joined Hicks and others when they confronted former Recovery School Superintendent Robin Jarvis to open a temporary school for King students, so that the could resume their studies, and to ultimately have King school reopened at its original location.
"There are some folk, I'm pretty sure, that didn't want to see it open who (Hicks) experienced on a daily basis, but they would not tell it to her face," Steele said. "Because of her leadership and commitment to this struggle, we were able to follow through."
Louisiana State Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek urged the audience to take the success further still. "If we recognize what the end in mind really is, it's not just one school in the City of New Orleans," he said. "This is a glorious day for this school, but there are many more schools to be rebuilt. There are many more schools to be renovated. There are bathrooms to be fixed, hot meals to be served and quality education to be provided to all the children in our city."
State Sen. Ann Duplessis, D-New Orleans, who represents the area, said the opening was an important step in bringing back the community. "One of the keys to creating community is schools, churches and those institutions that bring people in the neighborhood together," she said. "This is actually what we mean when we say we have to rebuild our community."
Hicks said more than 600 students have registered for the 2007-08 school year at King. King students finished the 2006-07 school year at the former Harney School on Willow Street, where enrollment was at 450, more than half of whom attended King school before the storm, she said
Eleven-year-old Dre'Shaun Napoleon, a fifth grader at King, probably summed it up the best in his welcoming address at Sunday's event.
"We are taking our final step on our road home," he said.

Valerie Faciane can be reached at vfaciane@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3325.